Cillian Vallely

Cillian Vallely learned music the old-fashioned way - from his parents Brian and Eithne, who founded the Armagh Pipers’ Club, a group that for over three decades has fostered the revival of traditional music in Ireland’s north.

Cillian took up his father’s instrument and polished his skills with tutelage from the late Armagh piper Mark Donnelly. His mastery of chanter, drones and regulators, and of all the accents and moods of the traditional piping idiom, place him in the first rank of today’s Irish pipers. Cillian now tours with the group Lúnasa, and has also performed extensively in America with groups such as New York’s Whirligig and Paddy O’Brien’s Chulrua, and has appeared with fiddler Seamus Connolly, Riverdance on Broadway and Tim O’Brien’s The Crossing.